(Howell Creek Radio address for January 5, 2013 -- ) # Scoop and Gallon It's the new year and all the holiday visitors have left Swaledale House. I guess Jacques and Pepper _were_ all the holiday visitors, but since Gwen has been renting a room as well, and often has her boyfriend, who we call Swiss Joel to distinguish him from all the other Joels in the district, over for compay in the evenings, the normally-quiet house having gone from three occupants to six felt alive with life and conversation, which was nice for a change, and from which we can now take an equally-nice break. December 31st marked the end of Swaledale's first complete calendar year as an occupied home -- the end of her maiden voyage, you might say. Seamen refer to the first tentative voyage of a newly-commissioned ship as her "trials," and barring a minor episode near the end in which her garage door froze shut, Swaledale's trials have been a marked success. We just fitted out her closets with shelves and (in the captain's quarters) cabinets. Her machinery cycles on and off with the regularity of a chronometer, and her plumbing and ductwork are still as clean as the pipes of Pan. She boasts, as well, some of those comforts and amenities which come with extended _occupation_ rather than by design alone -- chief among which is a drawer in her kitchen very fully-stocked with loose-leaf tea. I remember during one of our first visits to the home of good friends Theo and Kate, when it came time for a quaff of something hot. We were standing in the kitchen talking, and I don't remember if they opened the drawer for us or if they pointed at it and told us to find something we liked, but in any case pretty soon there it was, a drawer sitting open, very _large_ and very very full of loose-leaf tea. Trixie and I were astounded; I think we must have gaped and gawked a little, as if we'd opened the drawer full of hundred dollar bills by mistake; we were thinking of our little drawer at home where a mere three or four boxes of grocery-store tea huddled together for solace in a cold, lonely world. Kate only smiled in a funny sort of way, and looking down at the drawer said we could expect ours to look much the same when we'd been at sea together for four years like them. It turns out it didn't even take that long. It sort of got about that Trixie and I are tea drinkers. All year long, people found us interesting sources for the stuff and even bought it for us in packets and sacks as gifts. It's a convenient gift, perfectly appropriate to our household especially, a lasting source of pleasure that goes light on the checkbook -- and we never took it off our list. This continued steady all year long, until after Christmas Day, as deep as the drawer was, it simply would not hold more tea. I think I know now why Kate smiled ruefully at her tea drawer. I didn't understand it at the time; it seemed to me as though she thought it a mild inconvenience or an embarrassment to be laden with the very riches of the orient. But all the time you're on the hunt for fresh flavours you never think about disposing of the stuff. You never consider how many gallons of hot water you have to slosh down people's throats, your own or others', in order to dispense with only a few scoops of loose-leaf tea. The stuff just is not easily got rid of; it _lingers_. It _piles up_ -- gloriously, like money; tediously, because you can only spend a nickel of it at a time. Which is why, in the new year, I have taken it upon myself as a moral duty to drink as much tea as possible, whenever possible. In order, of course, to make room for more. * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio. I'm Joel Dueck. 2012 was a good year for this podcast, all in all; we're putting together a print edition of last year's episodes, with extra notes, so stay tuned for more info on that. You can find all episodes liner notes and transcripts at Howell Creek Radio Dot Com. Synopsis ------------- Radio address for Jan 5th, 2013. The new year marks the end of Swaledale's "trials" (the good kind) and finds us with more tea than we know what to do with. I did this address on my phone (you can probably tell from the sound quality). January is a busy month for me, so I'll probably be keeping things simple production-wise. Stay warm!